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first I have to say, that it is a nice review, I liked it. I only have one minor critic with the following piece of text:

quote:The sweet spot for gaming with this particular video card seems to be at low latency DDR2-667 settings as DDR2-800 provides negligible benefits. We are sure with lower latencies at DDR2-800 and a more powerful GPU solution that we would see further scaling increases in performance.

I strongly doubt, that you'll see any benefits with DDR2-800 modules, regardless of the GPU, because you forgot that the FSB1066 is limiting factor. Furthermore I assume, that the DDR2-667 scores are just better because of the better absolut memory latency.

Well, as you stated, your scores may be better again with DDR2-800 RAMs @CL3, but I think that such expensive oc modules are out of question in the low cost context of the article.

You guys need to seriously have a deeper look at the ASRock 775i65G sisnce it obviously is extremely competitive. What I want to know is:

what are the overclocking / voltage options and do they work with the Conroe?
I was seriously considering buying the 775DUAL-VSTA ... but since I'm running an overclocked D820 / 2 gig Mushkin DDR500 / AGP Radeon x850 XTPE.

Why bother with DDR2 as an upgrade path on the 775DUAL-VSTA when it doesn't make all that much difference and if I have to buy a new PCI card it'll have to be a very good one to best my overclocked x850 .... and that means I would want to stick it into a better motherboard than the 775DUAL-VSTA.

All I would need is the ASRock 775i65G and the Conroe for an upgrade that seems the best deal around. Who's with me ???? Reply

775i65G?
Exactly what i've been trying to find for the last week! :-)
But no luck getting any U.S. vendor too specify that they will ship me an R2 board.
Try googling 775i65G R2 and you'll find as many as you want...in Australia, U.K., Europe, etc...what's the deal with U.S. resellers?
I'm going to try emailing the article's author...
Reply

In stock at the above link, called them and they have a few of the rev. 2 boards in stock. The other board to have if you want the i865 chipset is the ConRoe865PE which should be released in a couple of weeks. Reply

I would love if Anandtech would get Asrock to supply one of these ConRoe865PE boards for comparison testing. I saw that board at the Asrock site a while ago but couldn't find anyone in North America selling it.

Asrock seems to slowly be creeping up from the back into the enthousiiast (on a buget) market. The first thing I would fix if I were them is add solid voltage control for the CPU and memory.

I'm an enthusiast but I hate dropping tons of cash for top drawer hardware when I can have very respectable performance by carefully selecting less expensive hardware.

I'm thinking about purchasing this board along with a Conroe CPU until the prices come down on the higher-model mobos such as the Asus P5W-DH. My most pressing question is how much of a bottleneck in gaming performance will be introduced as a result of ASRock including only PCIe x4 for the GPU.

I believe that in order to answer that question, a higher performing GPU needs to be used rather than a 7600GS. Could you guys also include an extra table/graph including a comparison between a 7800GS AGP 8x and 7800GS PCIe?

The reason I want to know is because I want to whether or not putting a DX10 card in the ASRock PCIe x4 slot will bottleneck the GPU.

Or, could you guys compare the performance of a 7900GT in the ASRock board with a 7900GT GPU in a P965, P975, or other mobos that has the full PCIe x16 connection? I don't to know what difference in performance there will be and to see if it's worth putting a 7900GT PCIe in the ASRock board.

Hi
I am thinking about upgrading my old P4 to a low end conroe, and after reading the article, was also thinking about the 775i65G.

Application will be mostly video rendering, and as a music server for my squeezebox, no gaming.

I am wondering how well the 775i65G overclocks, compared to something like a Gigabyte 865-DS3. I was thinking about the Gigabyte, but the Asrock would save a fair amount of money, will let me keep my AGP card and RAM, as well as being cheaper than the DS4.

From what I understand, the low multiplier of the Conroe hurts its overclocking chances with this motherboard. People have gotten very good overclocks with Prescotts and Celeron D's with the ADrock board, but only becuase those processors have much higher multipliers. I don't think the lack of voltage adjustment hurts it as much as the fact that you just can't take the FSB very high. Reply

I just want to add that I bought an ASRock 775 Dual-VSTA with a celeron D 326 to hold me over until I get a conroe, and I'm running some old DDR266 with no problems. I'm using an old Geforce 4 ti 4400 AGP in it and it works with most games (not Oblivion though unfortunately). So if you still have some DDR 266 laying around you'd like to use go ahead and buy this board. It has a ton of memory settings including some kind of memory compatability mode so it should work with just about anything.

However, even with the Celeron D 326 overclocked to 3.3GHZ, super pi 1M takes 59sec...roughly equal to my sempron 1.6ghz at stock speed. It is definitely a slow POS. Temps are still very low, going to try to get it up higher, 3.8 or 4.0ghz, but I'm not sure I can while keeping the memory at such low speed.

Another thing nice about this board which I haven't seen mentioned in the reviews is that it can run AGP and PCI-E at the same time, so you can have 4 moniters without needing a slow PCI graphics card.

Also, it seems that the AGP is only 4X. The settings in the bios only go up to 4X and Everest or something told me it was running my card at 4X, I doubt it makes any difference though. Reply

How does the memory compare on the 6800 Ultra? There does not seem to be any good benchmarks comparing the 3 cards (6800U, 7600GS, 7600GT). Does anyone have a link to a table for specifications (core clock, memory clock, pipelines)? Thanks. Reply

This does seem to validate from a cost vs. performance basis this motherboard..however I remain a tad sqeemish about making a platform jump from AMD to Intel using this board. Having said that though, if you are on a tight budget and you have to migrate parts I suppose giving this board a shot isn't a bad idea. Reply

quote:This does seem to validate from a cost vs. performance basis this motherboard..however I remain a tad sqeemish about making a platform jump from AMD to Intel using this board. Having said that though, if you are on a tight budget and you have to migrate parts I suppose giving this board a shot isn't a bad idea.

We will be reviewing some value/budget AMD AM2 combo motherboards in the future so the idea of incrementally upgrading to the newer platform from early S754/939 still holds true to a certain degree. Reply

"Although AGP is basically dead and the most powerful card available is based on the 7800GS chipset, we can see that it is still a very competitive solution in the mid-range market as is low latency DDR memory with the right chipset."

What about the limited edition Gainward 7876 BLISS, which is supposedly actually based on the 7900GT? Thats considerably more powerful than a regular 7800GS.

I have an inquiry into Gainward about the actual core used on this card. They still advertise it as a 7800GS based unit. Yes, it is very expensive when you can upgrade your CPU, motherboard, and memory for about the same price. Reply

"Who knew that AGP 8x and DDR would still be this competitive after a myriad of chipset, memory, CPU, and GPU enhancements over the last three years?"

i thought it was pretty settled that the move from agp 8x was introduced for 1.) marketing reasons so ppl actually buy new chipsets we dont need and 2.) so nvidia could make some extra cash off their SLI gig. the bandwidth agp 8x provided was never saturated. great article nonetheless showing that value boards are still a nice option (i own the Asrock Dualsata2, great mobo btw after they fixed the 274htt cap).

on a sidenote i love the part "deux" in the title, we're so international @ anandtech aint we.;) or maybe u're just canadian, hafta include some french in everything.:p Reply

I guess ATI doesn't count, huh? Also, would AGP provide the bandwidth necessary for SLI and Xfire setups? People keep making these sweeping "we don't need PCIe" statements without knowing or stating all of the factors involved. Reply

I added my sarcastic comment notation at the end of the statement. ;-) While PCI Express is certainly a welcome technology and will be viable for a long time (in computer terms), it was introduced too early and abruptly in my opinion. Except for SLI/CrossFire type setups, there was no real "engineering" requirement for it on the desktop until recently. Yes, there is a French/Canadian influence in the household. :) Reply

AGP had good bandwidth to graphic card, but much lower bandwidth from the graphic card. This isn't really a problem, as the only configurations that would need lots of bandwidth from graphic card to system would be the graphic cards with turbo cache (using system memory). As their performance is not so good, they don't generate a big need for bandwidth. Reply